


A Brief History of Time

by elrhiarhodan



Series: Paladin 'Verse [32]
Category: White Collar
Genre: Angst, Domesticity, F/M, Future Fic, Growing Old Together, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Multi, OT3, Schmoop, joy, marital sex, paladin 'verse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-20
Updated: 2013-06-20
Packaged: 2017-12-15 14:16:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,081
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/850511
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elrhiarhodan/pseuds/elrhiarhodan
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A look at the years of their lives through the eyes of Elizabeth Burke.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Brief History of Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is the capstone to the Paladin 'Verse, the final published story of the series chronology. That doesn't mean this series is complete, not by a long shot, but all previously published stories have now been published here on AO3.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has read and commented and left kudos, your enthusiasm is much appreciated.

When you’re twenty, time isn’t so much a precious commodity as something that moves too slowly, something that hinders you when you need to be older and need have more experience, when you _want to drink in a bar_. When you’re twenty, you don’t want to wait for time, you need to outrun it like the hare outruns the tortoise.

When you’re thirty, time begins to matter. You’re married, you’ve got a career, and you’ve now got a big, strong, handsome husband. But you’re in good health, you’ve just bought your first house and the future stretches in front of you like an endless field of flowers. You think – “do I want kids?” You talk about it endlessly with your husband, but you dare not mention that you really don’t want children with your parents…especially your mother, who keeps talking about your biological clock and that when she was your age, she already had given birth twice.

When you’re thirty-five, your mind’s pretty well made up. You’re not having kids. You’ve got your own business – it’s very successful, and you’ve got clients all over the country. You’ve got a husband who has an important and powerful job, one that can keep him at work until the wee hours of the night (but also gives him the ability to come home for a sandwich and some nookie during his lunch break). Life is good, and time runs apace with your heartbeat. You have everything you want, everything you need and you can’t imagine that life could get any better.

When you’re thirty-seven, you find your first gray hair – your first gray pubic hair. Your husband thinks is funny. Your lover blinks and calls you the most beautiful woman in the world. The two of them fuck you stupid, fuck you boneless and time doesn’t matter anymore. Or until the next morning, when you discover the second gray hair. You decide to get a full Brazilian the next time you go to L.A. You tell neither your husband nor your lover, and they are shocked when you get naked. Shocked, but pleased. Had you known that oral sex would be so much better without the nest, you’d have had it done years ago.

When you’re forty, time seems to move a little faster. Suddenly the seasons merge together – the month between Thanksgiving and Christmas is really more like ten days, and you begin to feel that Memorial Day, Fourth of July and Labor Day are successive three-day weekends. Your husband, he’s twelve years older than you, just smirks when you mention how quickly time is moving. Your lover is confused. He’s younger than you. You tease him – because he’s going to experience this too, in a few years. Or maybe not…the man is, in a way, too much like Peter Pan.

When you’re forty-five, time starts to become your enemy. So does gravity. What always pointed north, is now heading south. But neither your husband nor your lover seems to care. So you exchange the pretty little nothings from Victoria’s Secret with something that has a little more substance, and no one seems to mind. Your friends, the ones who’ve reproduced, start talking about their kids’ college prospects and how they are going to pay for Harvard or Yale. You smile behind your coffee cup. You and your husband and your lover are taking a month off and flying around the world on a private jet.*

When you’re fifty, you start thinking about retirement. Your husband is. He’s at the top of his field, respected, admired and frankly kind of bored. Your lover has diversified – turning a small fortune earned at the gaming tables into a vast fortune in real estate and art, all legit. You find yourself a little melancholy – a house filled with memories, but they will be no one to share them with, no one to pass them down to. It’s your biological clock – it’s come to a halt. You get hot, then cold. Your sex drive isn’t really what it used to be. But you do enjoy watching, and your husband and your lover still go at it like oversexed monkeys. And you are happy, mostly. You just wish that time would move a little slower.

When you’re fifty-five, your husband’s sixty-seven and your lover is fifty-one. You’re all pretty comfortable in your own skins, even if they are all a bit saggy. Well, not your lover’s – he’s still got 2% body fat and perfect cholesterol. Your husband’s gotten a nice little paunch – you like that, it’s comforting on cold nights when he holds you close and cups a palm around a breast that has totally given up any semblance of perkiness. It reminds you that there is beauty and grace in the creeping imperfection that age brings.

When you’re sixty, and you’ve sold your business and your husband’s retired and your lover would rather spend time puttering around his studio than coaxing money out of investors. You try not to think about time. But it can’t be helped – you know that you are all getting older, getting frailer, and becoming more vulnerable to the risks of time. While you’ve enjoyed good health, you know that sometimes it’s going to be a roll of the dice. Your lover, with his still perfect body, had a scare last year with some anomalous results for routine blood work, and your husband heart needs more attention. 

On far too many nights now, you wake and can’t go back to sleep. You get up and go down to the kitchen and make a pot of tea. You worry, you brood – you can’t put your finger on the problem, but it’s there, niggling at you, keeping you awake. Your husband sleeps the sleep of the righteous, but your lover, he was never righteous and he is still a very light sleeper. On these nights, he hears you leave their bed and follows you. He takes you in his arms and holds you tight. He understands the limitations of time, he knows that things will eventually come to their natural end. 

You shudder, once, twice and he turns you in his arms and tucks your head under his chin. He whispers that it’s all right, it’s okay to cry. And you do, even if it’s for no goddamned reason other than you’re not twenty anymore and while you’d hate to be immortal, you just wished you had a little more time.

__

FIN

**Author's Note:**

> * [$64,950 per person](http://www.nationalgeographicexpeditions.com/expeditions/aroundtheworld/detail)


End file.
